Saturday, March 26, 2016

Doran:Several
years ago I heard the story of a freshman chemistry course at an elite American
college. The professor informed the class that the electron model that they
were about to learn was known to be incorrect. Chemists had not yet ascertained
the correct model, so the students would learn the wrong model for now. In any
case, teaching the wrong model would not get anyone killed.

It is
hard to imagine political-science professors conveying a similar sentiment
about certain applications of the nation-state paradigm: “We are about to learn
a failed model, one that we know does not work where the requisite social,
cultural, and political elements are missing. But we don’t yet have a model
that works for those situations.” Perhaps chemistry professors are more candid
about what they do and do not know. Yet Western professors and policymakers
cling to the nation-state model today, even where it has proved untenable.

In
February, the Atlantic Council launched the Task Force on the Future of Iraq at
Georgetown University with a panel discussion led by former ambassadors Ryan
Crocker and James Jeffrey and Lieutenant General Michael Barbero. The panel
defended the borders created by the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, imposed
following World War I. The Kurdish representative to the U.S., Bayan Abdul
Rahman, pointed out that the current borders had been preserved at a terrible cost: “There has been genocide, chemical bombardment, war, bloodshed
repeatedly. And we’re seeing it today in Iraq yet again. So I think we should
stop thinking like 19th-century men” such as Messrs. Sykes and Picot. The Kurds
— the largest group of people on the planet who share a common language,
heritage, and culture but have no a country — and millions of others remain
hostage to a cynical, artificial Western political construct.

Later
in February, retired general Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the
NSA, candidly acknowledged what should have been apparent for some time:
Sykes-Picot and the concocted states it formed the Middle East have failed.
“Iraq no longer exists,” Hayden said. “Syria no longer exists. They aren’t
coming back. Lebanon is teetering and Libya is long gone.”

The two
positions are, of course, mutually exclusive: Either Iraq and Syria are
authentic states that merit continued recognition and sustainment or they are
contrivances that have come apart, and attempts to hold them together will only
lead to protracted violence. The claim against Sykes-Picot and faux
nation-states is quite simple: States marked by a diversity of ethnicities,
languages, heritages, religions, and cultures but lacking a developed concept
of the common good can maintain their unity only through coercion; when that
coercion is no longer present, parochial, sectarian interests will prevail and
the state will break apart. Put another way: Pluralistic democracy cannot be sustained
without a highly evolved public concept of common interest and the common good
— or without force.

In the
aftermath of World War I, several nation-states were recognized; others were
more or less artificially created, carved out of disintegrating empires. Those
with a common language, heritage, and culture, such as Poland, have been
generally stable. The states with boundaries arbitrarily carved out of empires,
such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Iraq, and Syria, have not proved durable.

By the
early 1990s, Yugoslavia had come apart in all but name. The secular Communist
state was sustained, despite its ethnic, religious, and cultural differences,
through the brute force of Marshall Tito’s regime. With the Cold War over and
Tito gone, Yugoslavia could not hold together; sectarian interests prevailed.
Iraq and Syria, states carved out of the Ottoman Empire, passed through various
phases of instability but were held together by ruthless Baathist
dictatorships. These states could not survive without coerced unity. Iraq and
Syria, following the Yugoslav pattern, descended into sectarian violence. Of
the states created after World War I, only Czechoslovakia had the good fortune
to dissolve along natural ethnic and cultural boundaries without bloodshed.

Ten
years ago, then-senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb proposed a plan for a federated, decentralized Iraq. The Biden-Gelb model borrowed heavily from the
1995 Dayton Peace Accords. We are left to wonder how many lives might have been
saved, and whether ISIS would exist at all, had leaders listened. Sunni tribal
leaders, however primitive their capacity to rule, no doubt would have
preferred self-government to a Tehran-dominated regime in Baghdad. It is
difficult to conceive of ISIS’s rise in a Sunni zone drawn out of the present
Iraq: Indeed, Sunni tribal leaders had already substantially reduced al-Qaeda
in Iraq, the forerunner of ISIS, during the 2007 surge. The Shia zone would
still have been dominated by Iran, but its diminished geography would
necessarily have meant diminished significance, and would have obviated much of
the anti-Shia animus that fueled ISIS. And the Kurds could have devoted their
energy to economic development rather than battling the Islamic State.

Western
policymakers failed first by imposing Sykes-Picot on the Middle East. They
failed next by not correcting that error, as they could have done by following
something like the Biden-Gelb proposal. This failure was accentuated by the
naïve belief (especially in America) that democracy would be a panacea for the
region. Some American leaders and policymakers believed that persistent sectarian
strife could be reduced simply through the introduction of elections. But
Anglo-American democratic governance is, of course, much more than elections.
Even in more authentic Mideast nation-states, such as Egypt, democracy has
proved fragile — especially democracy of the narrow, procedural variety. Even
the more robust pluralistic democracies of Western Europe suddenly appear
tenuous with the recent resurgence of ethno-nationalist movements.

A
common heritage and culture are necessary to the viability of a nation, but for
a democratic state to survive, there must be a strong sense of the common
good. American naïveté, while costly, is
understandable: It is the projection of American exceptionalism onto the Middle
East.

In
pluralistic democratic societies such as America, the sociocultural and
political order is maintained through the notion of the common good. Americans
rarely use the term “common good,” but the concept informs nearly every debate
in the public square, even amid the recent culture wars. Like social-contract
theory, it is rarely mentioned explicitly but is a powerful organizing concept.
However, it is highly unusual for nations with diversity of ethnicity,
heritage, and culture to transcend those markers of identity and embrace the
common good.

In the
Middle East, the promise of democracy has failed to forge a sufficient sense of
commonality in given populations or to overcome the more visceral division of
sectarian and tribal affiliation. So the faux nation-states of Iraq and Syria
have gone the way of Yugoslavia, descending into horrific sectarian violence.
In the former Yugoslavia, borders have been redrawn along ethno-religious
lines; cohesive, largely sovereign proto-nations have emerged; most important,
conflict has subsided. The epicenter of that conflict, Bosnia-Herzegovina, has
staved off violence for two decades through a decentralized, federated model —
precisely the model called for by the Biden-Gelb proposal. This was possible
only when the international community reached consensus on what should have
long been obvious: that the state created no longer existed.

If a
prominent public figure were to call for the restoration of Yugoslavia today,
it would be an act of professional suicide. Yet to claim that Iraq and Syria
must be sustained — for the sake of the “cartography of governance” or some
such — is regarded as somehow palatable, even though Iraq and Syria, like
Yugoslavia, have witnessed hundreds of thousands of deaths from violence:
testament to the exacting cost of a failed model. If America is to achieve a
meaningful foreign policy in the Middle East, its experts must learn to
acknowledge, like the humble chemistry professor, when the model they are
trying to apply is wrong.